In past blogs, we have discussed the issues and challenges pertaining to requirements. Now let's discuss some of the IBM Rational solutions for addressing the challenges through Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) built on the collaborative Jazz platform.

Rational Requirements Composer is designed to provide a solution for the creation and composition of meaningful requirements based on user and stakeholder needs. Rational RequisitePro is designed to provide a platform for the management of Requirements assets, the establishment of priorities, the estimation of costs, difficulty, etc.

One issue is that many notations are needed to express requirements. How the information is related and maintenance of the relationships need to persist. RRC uses hyperlinks, collections, tags and attributes to create relationships among artifacts.

Not everything needs to be expressed in text – UI storyboards are a great way to flesh out high-level scenario options and get user validation. Also great for fleshing out low level requirements that have dimensions that are visible in the UI.

A simple scenario using storyboards would be:

1. Product managers record and organize stakeholder requests

2. Product managers collaborate with development on milestone scenarios and use cases

4. UI Storyboards help team to rapidly iterate on scenario options and flesh out design

Another benefit with RRC is Distributed teams can collaborate around the world. Teams can save valuable development time by using the web-based review and approval workflow, which is role based with reviewers, approvers, and optional reviewers.

See the new capabilities in IBM® Rational® Requirements Composer, which expands this application from requirements definition to requirements management. This demo shows you reporting, the Web interface, Web review and approval, collections and snapshots, and collaborative application lifecycle management.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been talking about Jazz and Rational Team concert, the importance of collaboration they provide and the architecture of Jazz. This week I will go into a little more detail of the collaboration capabilities of Rational Team Concert.

Rational Team Concert makes it easy to exchange information directly in the context of your work. If an enhancement request changes, you and other team members are notified of the change automatically. You can reference the change in chat sessions and link to artifacts. Business stakeholders can also automatically stay informed about the status of task changes that interest them.

Several views enable you to share team information. You can track team activity, present information in more detail, or configure which information is visible at any time.

Many aspects of the software development lifecycle are integrated, including iteration planning, process definition, source control, defect tracking, build management, and reporting. Each of these aspects is integrated in a single environment. You can track and manage the relationships between artifacts, promote sound development processes, and gather project information automatically and unobtrusively.

All this collaboration within the tool provides the ability to reduce meetings and status reports, reduce rework and leverage top technical and business talent by matching skills with work items through the tool.

It is all about communicating all the details and changes throughout the development cycle and that is smart software development.

Use Rational Requirements Composer & Rational Quality Manager to align business with IT

Learn how the integration between Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) and Rational Quality Manager (RQM) highlights the capabilities that ensure project deliverables stay aligned to current business goals and requirements. The demo illustrates how IBM is taking integration and collaboration to a new level to help reduce project risk, reduce rework and increase productivity so that organizations can build the right product faster.